Robert Burton - Anatomy of Melancholy

Edited by
ANGUS GOWLAND

PENGUIN BOOKS

UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia
New Zealand | India | South Africa

Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

First published in 1621, revised 1624, 1628, 1632, 1638, and 1651
This edition published in Penguin Classics 2021

Editorial material copyright Angus Gowland, 2021

The moral rights of the editor have been asserted

Cover: detail from the frontispiece of The Anatomy of Melancholy, printed Oxford, 1628 British Library Board
All Rights Reserved / Bridgeman Images

Text design by Dinah Drazin

ISBN: 978-0-141-39523-4

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the authors and publishers rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

Writing about melancholy, for Robert Burton, was a personal imperative and an all-consuming endeavour. By his own account, Burton suffered from melancholy, and spent the last two decades of his life making an Antidote by reading and writing about it. The result was The Anatomy of Melancholy, almost certainly the greatest work on this subject in the history of western literature, and a book which, after its first publication in 1621, grew steadily in size in a series of revised editions, reflecting the authors ongoing quest to understand the disease and the world in which it occurred. By the time of Burtons death in 1640, the activity of writing and revising the Anatomy had become totally dominant in his literary career. A final version, with his last additions and amendments, appeared posthumously in 1651. It was his lifes work.

Burtons approach to this task was not to reduce melancholy to a single core by identifying its essential cause or symptom, or by discovering and recommending its most effective remedy, and he did not attempt to portray it with a unifying idea or overarching theme. Instead, he set about proliferating every form of recorded experience and expression of what was, for him, the most human, and therefore most multifarious, aspect of our worldly existence. When he chose to call his work an anatomy a voguish term indicating an analysis of a multifaceted object it was because he began with the recognition that investigating melancholy would mean investigating something expressed continuously throughout history, from classical antiquity to the present, in a bewildering variety of forms. This, in turn, involved identifying and describing the range of our physical and psychological dispositions, the diversity of our passions and the multiplicity of our entrenched moral, spiritual, and social pathologies, all of which, as Burton thought, contributed to our curious and fatal susceptibility to melancholy. As an anatomy, the book divides, subdivides and articulates the ways in which the multiple vagaries of human irrationality, for all their heterogeneity, share in this condition. And it orders its subject matter as effectively as such an undertaking could probably permit. As an anatomist, Burton worked to lay out the tangle of melancholic threads embedded in our nature and running through our culture and history. Once started, this would prove to be an unremitting enterprise, with each new edition showing an author bound to a task of layering in, and almost never removing, material with which to illustrate further the manifold presences and diversifications of the disease in human life.

The Anatomy of Melancholy